COVID revelations: Considering how presence matters
The COVID crisis troubles — and reveals — ordinary practices of being present online and offline
The experience of living and working in this 2020 pandemic has changed how presence matters to our everyday lives. Suddenly, we have all been caught in a social experiment where the thing we take most for granted about how we move about the world — being physically present somewhere — is the thing we need to pay close attention to. It is the thing we get most frustrated about on a personal level, when we cannot spend time in the company of familiar people or of strangers in the ways we are used to. It is what puts some of us in danger as ‘essential workers’ whose presence cannot be substituted or replaced in how they do their work. It puts others — me included — in a privileged position by allowing us to constrain our physical presence to (mostly) sanitized environments. We can replace physical presence by putting our active presence online, giving us the choice of when and where to show up or not.
For those of us who can show up remotely — who are learning to operate our working lives through technologically-mediated presence — the pandemic experience brings into relief precisely how being present matters. During the past several months living in this mode, my research brain has been cataloguing some of the ways that presence seems to matter in the ordinary interactions of working life, and how we are collectively socially organizing ourselves to allow for different modes of presence.
I’m especially inclined to catalogue about presence because I’m starting a new research project, thanks to an Aspasia grant from the Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (NWO) called Care Matters: Making and valuing home in a mobile world. This project focuses on activities of care for houses and how new forms of mobility help us recognize the continuous and persistent presence that matters for making houses liveable homes.
It is an evolution from my previous projects, which related to diaspora, migration, belonging and interaction — but at the same time, it is focusing on the same problem. Though my previous work addressed these issues on its surface, deep down it leads back to a core question:
how does presence matter?
If you are a person who has deep attachments to two places you can call home, how does your presence matter as you travel between them? How does being present matter for the interactions you have with people and with the place itself? How does being present in one place matter for how you feel when present in the other?
If you are that person who has attachment to multiple places, and are engaged in the process of exchange in a market, how does your presence — being there, presenting yourself in a certain way, and even being a person who wants to buy that thing — matter in determining the value of the thing? How do the other places where you belong show up in how you interact with people and how you orient to that object?
And now, in my current project, I’m looking at how that person who is attached to multiple homelands can also be invested — financially and emotionally — in multiple houses. Having multiple houses means you are usually physically present in of them, while maintaining an emotional presence in the other. And by emotional presence, I don’t just mean longing to be there; I mean worried about it, planning for its improvements or transformations, regretting decisions your actions connected to it, thinking about the next time you will occupy it… Generally, you are busy caring about that distant home while inhabiting another one. So the question becomes, how does presence matter when you are invested in a home but not always physically there? How are you actively present in ways other than embodied presence as the person responsible for caring for that house? How do houses require time, energy and attention to their care, even from people who aren’t present in them?
As I’m getting started on this project, the transformations that COVID has brought on being present is showing me different troubles and strategies for adaptation to this problem of presence. Ethnomethodologically, I am noticing two different aspects of presence that are thrown into relief as we try to learn to adapt to new normals: the multiplication of spaces and the absence of the background.
Simultaneous spaces, multiplied
The culture of online meetings (and, in my case, online classrooms) forces us to develop a skill for being present in two spaces simultaneously: one where we are sitting and one where our attention is actively directed. Notice that I’m not calling one or the other of these ‘embodied’ — both spaces require us to be actively using our senses and bodies to engage with them. The problem is how to learn to be embodied across these spaces, where our sensory and mental attention can ping-pong between them.
This is not to say we don’t already have experience doing this. We have experience in multitasking our attention. You know that you have spent time in meetings or in classrooms chatting to friends or family on your computer while listening to the speaker in the room. Now, however, the roles are reversed. What used to be the chat window is the immediate physical surroundings — the unbidden interruptions of pets or children, the cold draft of air from the open window — while the intended focus of our attention is limited to the chat window space. And, still on top of that, we have the normal distracting chat windows open alongside (or sometimes within) the meeting space on Zoom. Our attention multitasking is compounded, encompassing inter-layered spaces of presence.
Along with the challenge of reconfiguring our presence in an inverted online/offline space, we are exposed to new spaces — and to their distractions and interruptions. We see our colleagues’ and classmates’ homes, including the household members walking through the background, and hear the dings of arriving email and WhatsApp messages in their spaces. The embodied space we are occupying becomes multiplied across all the embodied spaces connected to it, through the bodies we are interacting with.
In some ways, being exposed to other people’s attention grabbers makes our meetings friendlier. We are now more engaged with the realities of each others’ home lives and perhaps more understanding about how our attentions can be divided between professional and personal needs. But it also exponentially expands the scope of what we are paying attention to, or at least what signals pop up within our sensory fields as needing attention. And we can not, for now, control these nudges by choosing to be present in one single space.
Background absence
Part of presence is simply about being an embodied person-in-the-room — not necessarily an active, engaged, and forceful participant, but how we take up space together. In a myriad of tiny ways, we sense human others in our surroundings and their signals can influence how we are engaging with the tasks at hand. You can see this pre-COVID in apps like Coffeetivity, which loops the noise of a crowded cafe or busy restaurant lunch through your computer speakers to make you feel like you’re working with the presence of many others. You can see it now in the need for recreated crowd noises at football matches, because fans who finally can watch live games from home are rattled by the eerie echoes of a players yelling in a mostly empty stadium. Social interaction isn’t just about those with whom we are directly speaking; it’s also about ‘bumping up against’ each other, eavesdropping, and serendipity of being in the same place at the same time.
These are the aspects of presence that have come to matter most to me — especially because I rely on them in my teaching. Under non-epidemic circumstances, I put students in groups to physically and mentally work together, while I practice targeted eavesdropping. Most of my teaching arsenal relies on this student-centred learning strategy, wherein students themselves are working on problems and learning from each other, rather than listening to a single speaker (i.e. me). Listening in on how they do this is much more effective for me in tracking what they are doing and thinking than asking them to report it. Without being able to eavesdrop, I feel really lost.
True, I can still overhear what’s going on in a small group using Zoom. I can enter a breakout room and listen to their conversation. But I cannot do it unobtrusively; I show up immediately as a video screen that is immediately evident to everyone else. I cannot hover in the corner and listen in to several groups at the same time. My presence, along with my attention, are trapped in the delineated space I have entered.
This is just one iteration how presence is also about the background as much as the foreground — about sensing broad physical spaces alongside interacting directly with our principle focus. Being present, we absorb with all of our embodied faculties and our abilities to attend to what’s going on. We sense affect and atmosphere; we pay attention to things in our immediate vicinity and things going on at a distance. We have those chance encounters that come before and after a meeting, but also observe interactions of others that we are not directly involved in. This is so much more information than simply talking to one another, which is what many of our interactions are reduced to with video communication.
How do these presences matter?
Ethnomethodologically, again, we can see how these presences matter because of the troubles they cause as we are trying to function while learning new versions of them.
My students this year are struggling with paying attention. It’s easy to blame an online environment and pine for returning to in-person classrooms, but that won’t help for the continuing months we face working in these environments and trying to succeed at the same levels we always have. Their attention is being multiplied across more spaces than they are used to — even with our old-people assumptions about their comfort with online life, this is a new era. The frustrations of not being able to be wholly present in a single place are having effects as we try to manage our attention.
Likewise, I see more and more people pushing to create background presences in their daily lives. Several months in to developing working habits for online life, I am hearing about colleagues planning video sessions together with no talking — just to have the feeling of working with a virtual someone else in the room. These practices are common from literature about diaspora and migration, where families keep a Skype connection open so that they can be present with each other across distant homes. Even if that distance is within the same city, it can still help fill the feeling of a background presence.
Both of these aspects to presence, I now realize, are part of what I want to investigate in this new project. A big part of Care Matters is trying to conceptualize how houses are spaces that we pay attention to, even when we are not focusing our attention on them.
Most of the time, like strangers who surround us in public, houses are just there; they are a background to where we are, rather than an entity that demands our focused attention. Yet, both houses and strangers still resonate within our experience of being present; even if we are not attending to them directly or persistently, we notice when they are not functioning in the way we expect. We miss them when they are absent.
Similarly, when we start moving between houses, we develop new senses of participating in multilayered, simultaneous spaces — much like, with COVID, since we have stopped moving between spaces, where we are present develops new layers. We learn to manipulate our embodied presences across spaces, dividing and multiplying our attention to what is going on in each. But this process is not necessarily easy, nor always achievable; we can get frustrated with ourselves and the limitations of our abilities to be present.
With Care Matters — and now with COVID — my attention is now focused on the work involved in being present as diffracted across multilayered spaces and backgrounds.
